SCROLL. Pause. Scroll again. A video of bombings in the Middle East. A celebrity kiss at an awards show. A headline about rising oil prices. A meme. All in under 10 seconds.
This is not a dystopian future; this is your daily feed. In the span of a single swipe, the suffering of real people sits alongside entertainment, gossip, and viral joy.
War and pop culture now share the same visual space, flattened into identical digital rectangles on our screens. Then, an uncomfortable question arises: Are we becoming desensitised to reality?
The modern feed does not distinguish between tragedy and triviality. A bombing in Gaza, a fuel price hike affecting families across the Philippines and Indonesia, and a celebrity breakup all arrive with the same formatting, the same aesthetic and the same rapid cadence.
In Indonesia, for example, this dynamic plays out on an enormous scale. The country now has more than 212 million Internet users, over 74% of the population. Around 143 million of them are active on social media, spending an average of more than three hours a day on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
This is one of the highest rates globally. But this is not just high access; it is high immersion, a constant state of being where the world’s weight is filtered through a six-inch screen.
The problem is not that entertainment exists alongside news. It always has; tabloids and broadsheets have coexisted for over a century. The problem is a juxtaposition that lacks emotional bandwidth. A war is followed by a meme; grief is followed by a giveaway.
The brain receives both in the same interface, which flattens diverse human experiences into a singular, shallow visual stream. Digital platforms are engineered to maximise engagement, not meaning.
Algorithms surface what captures attention, not what deserves it. The result is “algorithmic flattening”: a continuous stream of emotional extremes where tragedy and entertainment coexist without hierarchy, without pause, and without space to breathe.
Over time, psychologists warn, this produces compassion fatigue. Repeated, unprocessed exposure to distant suffering does not make us more sensitive; it makes us numb. We begin to consume tragedy the way we consume entertainment: quickly, passively and without sustained feeling.
There is growing evidence that these changes not only affect how we feel, but also how we respond. Research has shown that repeated exposure to mediated violence can reduce emotional responsiveness to others’ suffering.
Long-term studies also point to a measurable decline in empathic concern among younger populations raised in digitally saturated environments.
The shift is partly neurological. Empathy relies on social cues, facial expressions, tone of voice and physical presence to activate emotional understanding.
Digital media strips away this context. What remains is an image, a caption, and a three-second clip, consumed in isolation with no time to process or mourn.
When suffering feels distant, it begins to feel less real. That is not inherent cruelty; it is a coping mechanism that, if left unchec-ked, starts to look a lot like indifference.
While digital media is not inherently harmful, the danger lies in how witnessing begins to substitute for acting. In fact, technology has dramatically expanded what ordinary people can witness.
Social media has mobilised disaster relief, amplified voices ignored by traditional media, and enabled civic movements that would otherwise have remained invisible.
Empathy can be genuinely contagious; solidarity and collective action also spread across the web. The issue, then, is not access to information, but how that information is structured.
We are not lacking awareness; we are drowning in it. And when exposure becomes relentless, awareness without action quietly becomes apathy.
The feeling of having witnessed something starts to replace the act of responding to it. A bombing is followed by a dance video. A humanitarian crisis is followed by a product launch. The brain struggles to assign appropriate emotional weight to events that arrive at the same speed and in the same visual grammar.
Over time, everything begins to feel not equally important, but equally fleeting. A news alert about displaced families carries no more gravitational pull than a trending audio clip. Both vanish in the next scroll.
This is the deeper danger: not that we stop caring entirely, but that caring begins to feel optional, something to toggle on when the algorithm surfaces something sufficiently viral, and off when it does not.
So, are we desensitised? Honestly, partially and unevenly. Some users become more engaged, more informed, and more motivated by what they encounter online. Others become overwhelmed, then detached, then simply numb.
The response is not uniform, but the broader pattern is hard to dismiss, and harder still to ignore when it shapes how entire societies respond to crisis.
When empathy weakens, the social fabric that depends on it weakens too. The capacity to care about distant others has always been fragile; in the algorithmic age, it faces a new and particular kind of pressure.
The solution is not to abandon digital media – that is neither realistic nor desirable. But there is a challenge worth taking seriously: reclaiming intentionality. This means pausing deliberately on difficult content, resisting the frictionless scroll past discomfort and engaging beyond the headline.
These are not dramatic acts; they are small, conscious refusals to let an algorithm decide what deserves our humanity.
Platforms, too, carry responsibility. Designing systems that reward meaningful engagement over endless consumption is not a technical question; it is an ethical one. Eventually, this is about more than media. It is about empathy and what makes us human.
When war becomes just another post and suffering just another swipe, we risk losing something essential. We have more information than ever, but without empathy, all that awareness amounts to very little. — The Jakarta Post/Asia News Network
Angtyasti Jiwasiddi is a researcher and lecturer in information systems and digital marketing at Bina Nusantara University, Jakarta, with a focus on the social impacts of digital technology on people and society.
